I took Japanese 111 with Kaneyasu Sensei in the fall of 2021.
I applied to be in the Japanese Minor during this class.
Japanese-Minor-Declaration-Form-2021-EDITEDThis class was held on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Mondays and Wednesdays were held in-person, but Fridays we zoomed into class in 2 groups (we had a pretty big class).
I thought it was really helpful to hold class like this, because we had that in-person time to learn how to speak and use the language where sensei could more readily correct us or answer questions in the moment. We would use Friday as a supplementary day to finish what we didn’t get to during the week, or have one-on-one sessions with her to check in and ask more detailed questions.
Friday classes we utilized Zoom Breakout rooms to hold conversations with other classmates, or to do activities together to test and solidify our Japanese skills.
We would use SNS / Padelet (a fake SNS) to practice our Japanese.
I chose to use my actual Twitter because I had been using it to practice my Japanese since I started learning on my own. It was cool to be able to post something like this, especially the second one because I wanted to talk about my trip to Atlanta, GA anyways.
Shadowing was a big part of our learning in this class.
Shadowing sounds awful and embarrassing, but it’s an exercise to workout your mouth muscles so the language you’re learning feels more natural. It helped me because I’m really shy about talking so it gave me a way to speak in Japanese without having to try to hold a conversation. My shadowing sounds atrocious compared to when I’m trying to hold a conversation, but it helped me practice native pitch accent and speaking speed.
Kanji / Vocabulary
We didn’t expressly study Kanji, but Sensei didn’t shy away from using it in class, so we did end up learning a fair amount of Kanji. Because this is a beginner’s class we focused on hiragana and Katakana. Output wasn’t so important, we mostly learned it so we could recognize and read it, at least for the first half of the semester.